This
article is the concatenation and update of three previous articles on
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). It will be published later this
year as a chapter in a compendium book on emerging trends in KM.
In
North America at least, Knowledge Management (KM) budgets are under
constant siege, KM leaders' salaries and department headcounts have
been cut back, the Knowledge Director role has been relegated to a
subordinate back-office role, and many CEOs are searching for ways to
outsource the function entirely. In other words, most executives either
do not see KM as strategic to their organizations, or have lost faith
that investment in KM offers an appropriate ROI.
It's time for the knowledge 'champions' of the world to get together, and to get our act
together. As much as the idea of increasing the sharing and effective
use of information and ideas is appealing to just about everyone, KM
has not delivered on this promise. I believe time is running out.
The
story of KM so far has been, for the most part, a failure -- failure to
articulate, to imagine, and to implement. We allowed the bold vision of
knowledge-sharing to be diminished and appropriated by those who saw it
is merely an exercise in automating the acquisition, storage and
dissemination of documents. Many IT departments saw it as another facet
of technology -- as competition for resources and as little more than
an extension of the document management and website management
functions they were already responsible for. Many training departments
saw it as the 'content' side of training, and wondered why it didn't
report to them. Most executives saw it as a means to speed up and
reduce the cost of the back office, the same way the assembly line had
reduced manufacturing times and costs. And the creative people who
often had the Knowledge Director thrust upon them conceived of KM as a
means for increasing organizational innovation, customer satisfaction
and employee retention.
Now, a dozen years after the debut of
KM, there has been little
significant change in the efficiency, effectiveness or value of
information processes or content in most organizations. Many companies
that jumped early onto the KM bandwagon have all but abandoned it,
while many
organizations that waited are now repeating the mistakes of the
pioneers. Despite this, interest in KM remains substantial, and this is
because, while its promise has not really been realized, its potential
is still enormous. And CEOs of many organizations, having studied the
lessons of Enron, 9/11, Katrina and the Flu, have a nagging feeling
that, no matter how great the cost of investing in KM may be, the 'cost
of not knowing' is even greater:
What most organizations essentially did with KM was automate existing
information processes. They took the paper 'stuff' in manuals and memoranda
and newspapers and converted it into digital form. That made it easier
and (sometimes) cheaper to maintain, but did not increase its value,
which was, if you were to ask most of the people on the front line,
pretty marginal anyway. Organizations provided staff with access to the
Internet, but most of those who were inclined to use it already had it
at home and were using it there, without the restrictions imposed by
the company -- so that, too, was of marginal benefit. In some cases
employees are still forced to shuttle critical information between
their work and home PCs.
Most organizations, too, refused to abandon the top-down centralized
information model that was already in place, merely institutionalizing
it with firewalls, access restrictions, monster centrally-managed
one-size-fits-all databases and websites and over-engineered,
over-managed collaboration and community-of-practice tools.
Essentially, neither managers nor early KM practitioners 'got it': KM
is all about enabling people to obtain relevant, context-rich
information, and connection with appropriate experts, easily, when they need it, so that they can be more effective doing their
unique jobs.
As a result, the critical business information flows, shown in the top
diagram above, are essentially unchanged from what they were a decade
ago. There have been some minor changes in the technologies used for
these flows, but for the most part these have not been significant in
improving front-line effectiveness of workers, and in some cases have
actually made work more difficult. Management continues to rely on
well-entrenched IS to promulgate instructions and policy decisions and
to extract, often annoyingly and disruptively, information from the
front lines that it needs to make business decisions. To traditional
managers, information is still all about telling employees what to do and
making sure they do it.
Customers,
outside the corporate firewalls and disinclined to participate in technology initiatives designed for the suppliers' needs
rather than theirs (as most e-newsletters, e-rooms and Extranets are),
continue to interact, information-wise, with suppliers the same way they
always have -- receive (and usually turf) the marketing mail, put in
their orders and rely on their 'relationship manager' to decipher the
former and process the latter effectively. Business as usual, largely
unaffected by KM.
Things happen the way they do in organizations for a reason. When
people are unable to get the information they need 'within the system',
they will find workarounds to get it in other ways. This is nothing
new, and it is commendable -- it shows people care about the quality
and effectiveness of their work. The #1 means of getting and sharing
information is, was, and probably always will be conversations.
Pick up the phone, walk down the hall, use IM (if your company allows
it), use Skype (if your company allows it), or, as a last resort, send
an e-mail to the people who might know what you need to know.
It would make sense that KM would facilitate conversations, but if anything it has tried to obsolesce
them -- substituting context-poor databases that purportedly have the information
you used to get from talking with people, more efficiently. Not surprisingly, this has
rarely worked.
What we in KM need to do is go back to the original premise and promise of KM and start again -- but this time from the bottom up:
- Develop processes and programs, and buy or build tools, that measurably improve the effectiveness of front-line workers in the performance of their unique and increasingly-specialized jobs;
- Refocus from top-down centralized content acquisition and collection to peer-to-peer content-sharing;
- Develop processes and programs, and buy or build tools, that measurably improve sense-making: the value and meaning of content in context;
- Refocus from top-down community-of-practice management to enabling peer-to-peer expertise-finding and connectivity.
 This
bottom-up approach to KM, directed at the needs of individual employees
and their peer-to-peer interactions has come to be called Personal
Knowledge Management (PKM). It offers tremendous possibilities, and
could finally realize the original promise and expectations of KM, but
it can't be done within the budget that most organizations set aside
for KM. It requires a recognition from management that the four sets of
activities bulleted above will,
if properly implemented, yield huge improvements in the quality and
effectiveness of the organization's people's work -- repaying the
investment many times over. The quote at right is what one executive
told me when I suggested his company make such an investment. It shows
that, in many companies, labour costs are still seen as a necessary
evil to be minimized, and an additional investment in people, or
knowledge for them, is out of the question.
Fortunately,
management of most organizations has more sense than that. The
breakeven point for an investment of two hours of
personal coaching for each employee in an organization is, after all, a
mere 0.1% improvement in that
employee's work effectiveness. And, while some executives may be
impatient and disenchanted with the return on their KM investment to
date, they still appreciate Drucker's argument that improving
front-line worker productivity is "the greatest challenge of the 21st
century" -- that the answer isn't to do as much with less investment,
but to do much more with more.
The lower diagram at the top of this article shows what's possible
-- how valuable information flows could be enabled and facilitated by PKM. Step by step, here is what we would need to do to realize
this potential:
Revamp and upgrade the role of Information Professionals
from content managers to personal work effectiveness enablers. Most knowledge
workers have figured out how to get the content they need to do their
jobs well, without any help from KM. Centralized content management
initiatives offer little or no incremental value to them. What they
need is hands-on help using the
information and technology at their disposal more effectively in the context of doing their own unique jobs.
This does not lend itself, in most organizations, to either classroom
or computer-based training -- it needs to be face-to-face,
anthropological: The IP needs to observe how the worker uses technology
and information now, and then advise them how to do so more
effectively. And at the same time, the IP needs to help each worker
organize their personal content so that they can manage it effectively
and find (again) what they need when they need it. We need to get IPs
away from their collections and help-desks and out into the field
helping workers one-on-one. This is the essence of PKM.
Reintermediate Information Professionals to filter and add
sense, meaning and value to information content. One of the initial goals of KM was
disintermediation -- getting rid of the layers between front-line
people and useful information. The problem is, most front-line people
are now overwhelmed with the volume of information coming at them, and
find most of what is available on the Internet too raw for their needs:
They need help making meaning and sense of this information.
IPs, as reintermediaries, can fill this need in two ways: They can
massage raw information using visualizations, maps, tableaux, systems
thinking charts, single frames, decision trees and other techniques,
and they can add insight by synthesizing, analyzing, organizing and
providing context for this
information so that, in the hands of the knowledge worker, it is easily
understandable, compelling and ready
to apply.
Develop
simple, automated mechanisms to facilitate peer-to-peer content-sharing with others
inside and outside the organization. These mechanisms include:
- Customizable, easy-to-use, context-rich personal workspaces
(similar to weblogs, but with additional functionality, security, and
flexibility, while still being easy to learn and use) where all
personal information that is shareable with others can reside.
- Automatic peer-to-peer publishing and subscription
mechanisms that allow employees' shareable content to be accessed by
others, and high-value content from the Internet, and from other
employees and outside colleagues, to flow automatically to the
employee's desktop.
- Automatic knowledge harvesting
mechanisms that pull employees' shareable content into a central
searchable archive copy, to obviate the need for 'submitting' knowledge
to central repositories.
Develop
mechanisms to enhance meaning and context of information content so
that it 'makes more sense' and has more value to users. These mechanisms include:
- Templates, e-mail lists, lists of 'experts' and other aids for
identifying and asking the right people for the right information on a
quick-turnaround basis, in a single, easy-to-use just-in-time canvassing application.
- Templates and models for creating high-context stories and narratives.
- Templates, models and self-study modules for creating visualizations, maps, single frames and other compelling, meaningful representations of information.
- Templates,
models and self-study modules for creating systems thinking charts,
structured thinking documents, analytical reports and other insightful distillations and interpretations of information.
- Templates, models and self-study modules for creating mindmaps, open space events and other support mechanisms that enhance the effectiveness of, and document, conversations.
- Templates, models and self-study modules for improving observation, listening and attention skills (e.g. cultural anthropology tools).
- Tools and mechanisms for surveying employees, customers and the 'informed' public and otherwise tapping the 'Wisdom of Crowds' (including 'prediction markets' and decision support applications).
Develop mechanisms to enable peer-to-peer expertise finding and connectivity. These mechanisms include:
- Simple, one-click virtual presence applications for connecting person-to-person with
people (individually and in groups), with full audio (including ability
to record), video, whiteboard (see what others in a conference are
looking at and doing) and application sharing capabilities.
- Simple, intuitive collaborative workspaces and worktools (enhanced, simplified versions of wikis, BaseCamp etc.)
- Well-designed, automated people-finding applications and directories.
- Simple presence-detecting and peer-to-peer introduction applications (enhanced, simplified versions of Dodgeball etc.)
The
following table contrasts the traditional, top-down, just-in-case
content-and-collection KM approach with the bottom-up, peer-to-peer,
just-in-time, reintermediated, context-connection-and-sensemaking PKM
approach:
| KM Program Objective: | Traditional KM Approach: | PKM Approach: | | Knowledge 'User Training' | Enterprise application training
(classroom, CBT and newsletters distributed top-down) | Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI);
Personal Content Management (PCM) | | Content Sharing* | Top-down collection in central repositories;
Formal submission process | Personal Shared Workspaces;
P2P Publishing & Subscription;
Automatic Content Harvesting
| | Sense-Making & Context Enhancement | (not addressed) | Just-in-Time Canvassing;
Stories & Narratives;
Visualizations;
Insight Analyses;
Conversation Support;
Observation Support;
Surveying, Predicting & Decision-Making | | Connectivity* | Community of Practice management;
Network mapping | Virtual Presence;
Collaborative Workspaces/Tools;
People-Finders;
P2P Presence Detecting and Introduction | | Role of Information Professionals | Repository Management
Website Management | Personal Work Effectiveness (PPI + PCM);
Sense-Making & Context Enhancement |
*Content sharing and connectivity tools are collectively known as 'social networking' applications.
Executives
preoccupied with risk and cost minimization will continue to wait on
the sidelines for pioneers to show them that the
risks and costs of such programs are far outweighed by the benefits of
better productivity, more engaged, informed and insightful
employees, better connectivity, more context-rich knowledge-sharing and
improved collaboration among employees and outside experts.
I first got interested in the
idea of bottom-up personal knowledge management, focused on the unique needs of
each front-line employee, in 2003, my last year as Global Director of
Knowledge Innovation for a major professional services firm. I'd been
asked to investigate a leveling-off of use of the firm's award-winning
centralized knowledge resources, and decided to do the research through
personal interviews with non-users,
rather than the usual user surveys. We did about 100 interviews, and
tried to get at the root causes of the problems and concerns they
cited. So for example while many interviewees said they 'couldn't find'
what they were looking for, we tried to discover why this was: Was the
tool too complex? Was the training inadequate? Was there too much
content to wade through? Did they just not know where to look? Was the
content badly indexed? Was it in the wrong format for convenient
(re-)use? Or perhaps what they sought didn't exist at all. Or worse,
they weren't motivated to make the effort to look for it.
In describing this work I've used three of the interviews that were
especially illuminating. One of these was a corporate finance
practitioner who confessed he'd completely stopped reading newspapers
because 'general' knowledge was unnecessary for his work, and used his
PC only for e-mail and business valuation spreadsheets. A second was an
audit manager who said she couldn't 'afford' the intrafirm charge for
research work and simply had no time to do such research herself, so
she did without; she also confessed that she'd never been taught how to
find stuff on her own PC and could never find what she needed on her
own hard drive. A third was a tax partner who delegated all 'knowledge
work' to subordinates or assistants, even printing out and routing his
e-mails. When I asked him about Instant Messaging, he said he 'handled
it the same way'. Ouch!
My conclusion from the interviews was that most of the firm's
front-line people didn't use the knowledge resources because they
didn't know how. I had been reading about a KM process that entailed
one-on-one coaching of front-line people to use knowledge and
technology effectively, and named this (for internal selling purposes,
and with a tip of the hat to Drucker) Personal
Productivity Improvement (PPI). When I proposed PPI as the solution to
ineffective knowledge use, however, my boss said he was doubtful that,
if they weren't willing to take the time to attend the firm's courses
or computer-based training on the use of knowledge resources, employees were
just as unlikely to make time for PPI. He sent me back to find out why practitioners
didn't know how to use the resources effectively.
When I went to conduct the second round of interviews, it became clear
that some of the interviewees had given me the answers they thought I
wanted to hear because they didn't
know the real answers. They were also blunter and more
forthcoming when I went back to suggest that perhaps their ignorance of
use of the firm's knowledge resources was partly their fault. This
time, the corporate finance practitioner told me he was paid for his
specialized technical knowledge, not for his understanding of business
issues. He described the powerful, integrated newsfeeds and
personalizable news profiles, the paintakingly populated databases, and
the collaborative spaces we provided as "nice to have, not need to
have". He was, he said, "unmotivated, so far" to learn more about what we had
made available.
The audit manager pulled out an independent consultant's report that
listed in the criteria clients used to select a professional services
firm. In order they were (1) strong pre-existing relationship with
someone on the team, (2) fit and likability of the pursuit team, (3)
senior face time spent with client key decision makers during the
pursuit process, (4) technical competency and experience of the pursuit
team, (5) understanding of the client's processes and organization, and
(6) understanding of the client's business and industry. There is just
no time, she told me, for stuff that clients don't think very
important. If she had more time, she said, she would be spending it out
at clients building relationships, not at her PC looking for knowledge.
[I later interviewed some clients who somewhat sheepishly corroborated
the findings in this report, and said this audit manager was wise in
setting her priorities.]
And the tax partner grabbed me as I passed near his office, whisked me
inside, and told me how delighted he was that, after I'd mentioned it,
he'd got his assistant to show him how to use Instant Messaging. "If a
client calls me on the phone with a question, sometimes I can IM a
staff member and get confirmation of the answer while the client is
still online, so I save research time and the client is very
impressed", he told me. "It's stuff like this IM that really makes you
guys valuable, not those giant repositories you build." If that weren't
distressing enough, he confided that he was concerned that some of
those 'giant repositories' were accessible to everyone in the firm, and
could we please restrict access to these to tax practitioners only? He
patted me on the back. I sighed.
So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized content we
spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to
most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI said they
would love to receive PPI coaching, provided it was focused on
the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in
the central repositories.
Subsequently
I met with a number of the firm's competitors, and KM leaders of
several other organizations that have experienced some frustration with
the performance of their KM programs, and almost all of them expressed
substantial interest in (and sympathy for) these findings and this
approach.
From these interviews and subsequent discussions with leading KM gurus,
notably the UK's David Gurteen, emerged the concept of Personal
Knowledge Management (PKM). Some of the PKM elements are starting to be used, at least in part and in pilots,
in quite a few organizations.
Here's a primer on how some of these elements can be introduced in your organization:
Personal Productivity Improvement: (leading practice: Ernst & Young, KPMG)
- Pre-interview each employee in the organization to
understand their job, what knowledge and technology they use and how
they use it.
- Pre-assemble a file of possible 'leave-behinds' -- 'cheat
sheets', step-by-step instructions, FAQs, bookmark lists etc. that the
employee is likely to find useful, based on your previous PPI sessions
with others with similar jobs or learning styles.
- If you don't already have a personal content management program (see below) get this set up for the employee first.
- Schedule about an hour face-to-face with the employee. The
first half-hour should be spent observing and asking questions of the
employee to identify significant productivity problems. The second
half-hour should be spent showing
the employee more effective ways of doing their work, stepping them
through the leave-behinds, answering questions and getting feedback
from the employee on the value they feel they have received from the
session.
- Compile a list of observations and systemic problems that
PPI cannot resolve, and present them to senior management for them to
address.
Personal Content Management:
- Work with each individual employee to help them organize
and index their 'My Documents' and e-mail folders in a way that makes
sense for them. A standard firm-wide taxonomy is rarely appropriate and
with current technology it is no longer necessary. Each person's files
should be set up the way they would set up their personal filing
cabinet if the documents were all hard-copy. Rather than by
subject-matter, the most effective organization scheme is often 'taskonomic' rather than taxonomic -- indexed by how
or when it will be (re-)used.
- Deploy Google Desktop or some other fast, simple, powerful desktop search tool.
- Use RSS feeds to simplify 'publishing' and 'subscribing' to
others' content, and show employees how to use them and how to
integrate this content into their personal taxonomy.
- If you have canvassing and/or harvesting programs (see below) show employees how to use them and how to integrate this content
into their personal taxonomy.
- Develop and disseminate (with simple one-page instructions
or FAQs) routines and practices for effectively capturing, filing and
finding relevant knowledge in the context of what it is to be used for.
Personal Shared Workspaces, Publishing & Subscription:
- Educate the project team.
- Identify the pilot group: There are three constituencies in organizations who will more readily see the benefits of using personal shared workspaces and who are therefore natural pilot groups:
(a) subject matter experts who are inundated with requests for
information and advice, who could benefit from having their 'electronic
filing cabinet' accessible to and browsable by others in the
organization, (b) those in the company who are already publishing
newsletters and similar regular bulletins, and (c) those who are
coordinating community of practice networks.
- Develop a starting personal 'taskonomy' and starting personal content archive for each pilot group member.
- Select and adapt a commercial weblogging tool and/or develop your own personal shared workspace tool.
- Get
the IT subteam to: Convert personal content archives to HTML &
‘bulk publish’ them, create a personal TOC for each group member, and
develop a password protection scheme.
- Offer everyone in the
firm a brief seminar on personal shared workspace publishing &
subscribing. Let interest in using these tools spread virally.
- Talk up personal shared workspaces outside the organization.
- Set up a personal shared workspace help/monitoring group.
Automatic Content Harvesting: (leading practice: Hill & Knowlton)
- Create separate Public and Private 'My Documents' and e-mail folders on each employee's hard drive.
- Whenever users 'save' or store a document or message,
prompt them to decide whether the document should be stored in the
Public (shareable) or Private folder.
- Establish an automated mechanism like RSS to regularly
'harvest' the Public folder information, to a central mirror site
that other users can browse, and/or in response to just-in-time
canvassing searches (see below), peer-to-peer.
- Encourage people in the organization who maintain the most
valuable context-rich content (e.g. subject matter experts, network
coordinators and newsletter editors) to use personal shared workspaces (see above) to post
and archive their content as part of their Public folder.
Just-in-Time Canvassing, and People-Finders: (leading practice: Lend Lease corporation)
- Use social network analysis (mapping or interviewing) to identify the de facto networks of expertise and trust in the organization.
- Use these to identify network coordinators, the 'people to go to first' on key subject matter areas for your organization.
- Have these coordinators create, maintain and publish
Canvassing Lists (e-mail groups) with e-mail, IM, phone and other
contact information for the people in these subject matter networks, so
that anyone in the firm who wants to canvass people in a network can do
so with one click. These lists should include experts outside as well
as inside the organization.
- Create Canvassing Templates, forms that people can fill in
quickly and simply to describe what expertise they're looking for, and
then send them to one or more Canvassing Lists.
- Devise a simple one-page instruction sheet/FAQ on how to
effectively use the Canvassing Lists and Templates, which
communication media to use in different circumstances to contact them,
and how to deal with telephone tag, non-responses and other situations
when canvassing response is inadequate. It should also deal with
appropriate etiquette and protocols to ensure the canvassing process
isn't abused.
- If you also have an Auto-Harvesting program (see above),
consider putting experts' weblogs and other context-rich resources in
the Canvassing List to use as a surrogate for people who are unable or
unwilling to respond to canvassing requests personally.
For
many organizations, the traditional approach to KM is no longer a
viable option. I believe PKM offers a sensible alternative, one that
draws on some of the success stories in social networking and some
pioneering programs of some of the world's leading knowledge-enabled
organizations. It also resonates with the ways in which we have always
shared what we know most effectively: through conversations, stories,
just-in-time inquiries through those we know and trust, learning by
watching others, and copying others on documents, messages and
learnings we believe they would find valuable.
This is a complex system
approach to KM: It respects that things happen in organizations the way
they do for a reason, and that people will find workarounds whenever
processes, including knowledge processes, work suboptimally. Rather
than trying to impose new processes and infrastructure on people, PKM
attempts to support and reflect the ways we intuitively learn and share
what we do. It adapts technology to people's behaviour, rather than
forcing behaviour to adapt to new technology.
What is missing,
still, is more pioneers. Cost reduction, outsourcing and risk
management are the strategic issues of the day in the corner offices of
most organizations, and improving employees' work effectiveness and the
quality of their work are not as high on the priority list. The onus is
on us as KM champions to create new, compelling value propositions for
KM (and specifically PKM), to produce business models that measure
what's important and come up with astonishing ROIs for investment in
PKM activities, to stress the Cost of Not Knowing without
scare-mongering, and to continue to do small-scale experiments and
share the results of our experiments with each other. That's the only
way to get the attention of senior executives, and get them to start
investing again.
And this time, once we do get that attention and investment, we'd better learn from past mistakes and do the job right. |
MADE IN CANADA
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